Ernest Hemingway: The Mortarly-Wounded Writer

     Ernest Hemingway was born July 21st 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He was one of three children, he was the second born, and the first son. Hemingway had a normal childhood, when he was 17 he took a journalism class and wrote for his school's paper.  A year later he wrote for the Kansas City Star and wrote a few articles. The significance of the Kansas City Star is he got his writing style from their guideline: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

Hemingway In Uniform

     When he was 19 he joined the Red Cross and became an ambulance driver in Italy for World War I. Soon after joining, while bringing chocolates and cigarettes to troops, he was almost killed by mortar fire, and had to be put in a hospital and operated on immediately. While he was recovering he fell in love with a nurse by the name of Agnes von Kurowsky. They planned on getting married, but he was eventually rejected.
     When he returned to the states and was still recovering he did not have much to do. He moved and worked to Toronto at a job oppurtunit, but eventually moved to Chicago. This is where he met his first wife: Hadley Richardson. They decided to get married and move to Europe, originally they wanted to go to Rome, but Hadley suggested Paris because the "monetary exchange rate" made it an inexpensive place to live.
     In Paris, Ernest met many other writers, such as : Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. He also met prestigous painters such as Picasso. In France he continued to write for the newspaper in Toronto, and managed to publish 88 articles. Ernest and Hadley had their first child on october 10th, 1923. He wrote his first book in Paris: Three Stories and Two Poems.  He also started The Sun Also Rises in Paris. This was proclaimed as some of his best work. He later had troubles with his marriage and divorced Hadley. He married a writer who came from America, to write for Vogue, named Pauline Pfeiffer. Soon after they married they moved to Key West, florida.

Hemingway In Paris

     Hemingway lived in Key West for 9 years. In these years 2 of his children were born: Patrick in 1928, and Greogry Hancock in 1931. He wrote a Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon , Green Hills of Africa, and started To Have and Have Not during this time.
     In 1937, he moved to Spain, to report on the Spanish Civil War. During reporting on the war, he met another journalist named Martha Gellhorn, who also worked for Vogue in Paris. He wrote his only play in Spain, The FIfth Column. In 1939, Hemingway took a boat to Cuba and started to live at Hotel Ambos Mundos. It was during this time , in Cuba, that him and Pauline started to seperate and eventually divorce, and he married Martha Gellhorn. In Cuba, he wrote his Pulitzer Prize receiving book, For Whom the Bell Tolls. He later reported on World War II on such events as D-Day. 6 years after he married Martha, he found himself in love with a reporter of Time magazine; Mary Welsh. On the third time meeting her, he asked her to marry him and she accepted. Martha left him after he was wounded in a car crash, calling him stupid and irresponsible.
     In 1946, he moved back to Cuba with Mary. In 1948, they stayed in Venice a few months, where Hemingway fell in love with a 19 year old named Adriana Ivancich. Their affair inspired him to write Across the River and Into the Trees , published in 1950, which had generally negative reviews. Angered by the criticism he wrote "the best I can write ever all of my life"-(ernest hemingway)
 which produced; The Old Man and the Sea. This book was regarded as excellent and it became a book-of-the-month selection. This put Hemingway back on the map, and he won the Pultizer Prize for Whom the Bell Tolls in 1953. In 1954, he was injured severely in two plane crashes. In 1954, he also received the Nobel Prize of Literature. In 1959 he finished four books: A Moveable Feast, True at First Light, The Garden of Eden, and Islands in the Stream.
     He became unhappy with Cuba, and moved to Ketchum, Idaho in 1959. In Idaho, his life took a turn for the worst and he became depressed. He was injured from a plance crash and would never be able to walk normally again. On July 2nd, 1961 he commited suicide by shooting himself in the head with his double-barreled shotgun.

Ernest Hemingway in his older years

     His writing style is taken from the Kansas City Star's writing code. Most of his writing is influenced mostly on real events that have happened to him, as you see most of his books have some piece of his life in them.

    Interesting Details About Hemingway's Life: Even though Gertrude Stein was one of the first people he met in Paris, he eventually got into a quarrel with her and they weren't on speaking terms for a while.
     Like most other writers: he started writing with his high school paper: The Trapeze.
     He commited suicide. His family has a strange tendency to commit suicide. His father, and his two siblings both ended up commiting suicide. It is apparently caused by the disease Hemochromatosis, which makes your body unable to produce iron and keep mentally stable.

Questions:

     1. Ernest Hemingway came to France for multiple reasons. The biggest is probobaly that when he married Hadley they decided to live in Europe together. They chose Paris because the monetary conversion rate made it inepensive to live in. He also could write for the Toronto newspaper in Paris.
     Paris was also a place filled with the arts, and a perfect place for a blossoming young writer like Hemingway.

     2.I beleive he just chose France because his wife wanted him too. Originally he wished to go to Rome and write, but she wanted Paris, and he gave in. The book The Sun Also Rises has a majority of the story taking place in Paris.  Three Stories and Ten Poems was also influenced by French culture.

Sample: The Sun Also Rises- ch 1
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly's star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn's distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.

      3.I think his writings are some of the best in 20th century American literature. His writings are just to the point, no lack of detail, but no "drawing-out-nothing." In this pasage we see him write short sentences that get to the point, and draw us in, and make us want to read more. He ends the paragraph with a sort of cliffhanger, using understatement to make being a boxing champion seem easy.

     4. I would be very intrested in more of his work. The only book I have actually read by him is The Old Man and The Sea ,but it was excellent. In the future I hope to find a book of his I may enjoy, and read it for paralell reading.

By Jaron Segal